Orfield, Jr., a law professor at the University of Minnesota, heater cases were diverted to “judges statistically far more likely to convict.” Some cops tried to avoid the stress of such cases: in 2005, a retired detective told the Chicago Tribune, “You pray to God not to give you a heater case.” Others, like Boudreau, didn’t shirk the challenge. Many crimes went unsolved.Ĭases that attracted significant media attention, however, often became known as “heaters,” drawing the resources necessary to make arrests and secure convictions. Tenants, seeing police below, sometimes threw trash from their windows. The neighborhood was overwhelmingly black, but the police force was overwhelmingly white, and it struggled to establish authority. “They were killing people left and right,” Kenneth Boudreau, a veteran detective who served in Area One, told me. Robbery, rape, and murder were commonplace. Their territory included the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, twenty-eight public-housing towers whose stairwells were controlled by drug gangs. Even in a city that was averaging three murders a day, Area One detectives were exceptionally busy. Homicide investigators from Area One, the branch responsible for the neighborhood around Fifty-eighth and Michigan, took up the case. Dental records confirmed that it was Morgan. The body was naked, except for a black-and-white pin-striped shirt. 38-calibre gunshot wound in the stomach and two more in the back. A forensic team arrived to find a decomposing male corpse on the floor, between the front and back seats, with a. Neighbors had reported a putrid smell escaping from a cracked rear window. Nine days after Morgan disappeared, the Cavalier was found parked in front of a run-down building on South Michigan Avenue, near Fifty-eighth Street. Police created a toll-free number to encourage leads and plastered the South Side with photographs of him. Morgan’s disappearance made the Chicago evening news. After nightfall, she notified the police that her son was missing. Morgan always called to say that he’d be late. “He would never back off from family,” Peete told me.Įscoffery stared at the phone for hours. Escoffery had warned her son to be wary of such gestures, but he welcomed them. He had attended his son’s basketball games and made other efforts at reconciliation: that day, he had booked a room for Morgan and his girlfriend, Lorena Peete, at a local Days Inn. Morgan’s father, Marshall Morgan, Sr., had recently come back into his life, after an absence of seventeen years. “All we had was each other,” Escoffery told me. She and Morgan were close: she became pregnant at fifteen and brought him up, an only child, on her own. When Morgan didn’t come home, his mother, Marcia Escoffery, grew worried. His coach, Ed McQuillan, told me recently that Morgan was a “great kid” and a complete player, who was “quicker than hell, great on defense-he could shoot long, and he could drive and penetrate.” The season had just ended, and he had performed notably well, averaging eighteen points and three steals a game he had been the runner-up for the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference’s most-valuable-player award. Morgan was a twenty-year-old sophomore at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he played point guard on the basketball team. After he got the car cleaned, he planned to return home and spruce himself up: he had a date with his girlfriend that night. It was a warm day, and he wore denim shorts, a black-and-white pin-striped shirt, and black sneakers. Morgan was borrowing the car and, in return, had agreed to get it washed. At around two-thirty in the afternoon on May 8, 1993, Marshall Morgan left his mother’s house, on the South Side of Chicago, and drove off in her light-blue Chevrolet Cavalier.
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